Page:Myth, Ritual, and Religion (Volume 2).djvu/224

210 himself uncertain. A crowd of hypotheses have been framed by more sanguine and less cautious etymologists. Artemis has been derived from, "safe," "unharmed," "the stainless maiden." Goebel suggests the root or, "to shake," and makes Artemis mean the thrower of the dart or the shooter. But this is confessedly conjectural. The Persian language has also been searched for the root of Artemis, which is compared with the first syllables in Artaphernes, Artaxerxes, Artaxata, and so forth. It is concluded that Artemis would simply mean "the great goddess." Claus again, returning to his theory of Artemis as originally the wife of Zeus, inclines to regard her as originally the earth, the "mighty mother." As Schreiber observes, the philological guesses really throw no light on the nature of Artemis. Welcker, Preller, and Lauer take her for the goddess of the midnight sky, and "the light of the night." Claus, as we have seen, is all for night, not light; for "Night is identical in conception with the earth,"—night being the shadow of earth, a fact probably not known to the very early Greeks. Claus, however, seems well inspired when he refuses to deduce all the many properties, myths, and attributes of Artemis from lunar aspects and attributes. The smallest grain of ingenuity will always suffice as the essential element